Trump Tower planned for New Orleans is on hold for now

A 70-story tower that is being developed on Poydras Street by real estate magnate Donald Trump and a team of Florida developers is on hold pending the recovery of the national economy, the Associated Press is reporting.

Stephen Dwyer, an attorney for the developers, said Tuesday that the project has not fully secured the financing it needs but still plans to move ahead, hopefully by the end of the year. Dwyer told the Associated Press that it's not a matter of if the project will go forward, but how big it will be when it does.

Plans for the Trump tower, which is to be built on what is now a parking lot, were unveiled just days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005. The structure is expected to be the city's tallest once it is complete.

Developers have said that the building would include retail space on the ground floor, followed by 15 floors of parking and a sky lobby on the 17th floor. The upper stories would consist of 290 traditional condos and 435 condo-hotel units that owners could rent out when they were out of town. But the development team also said it was considering swapping out some of the condo-hotel units for more strictly residential units.

Early last year, the developers said they would begin construction of the Trump tower once they sold half the units in the building, but at the time they declined to say how many reservations they had taken.